Can Microsoft really build a better browser?

Internet Explorer 9 is looking promising. But it's up against stiff …

At last year's PDC, held in November, Microsoft showed a graph showing scores of a variety of Web browsers in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, to show off the progress that the company was making with Internet Explorer 9. Another such graph was shown off at the recent MIX event. What was most interesting about the graph was not IE9's progress, but Opera's.

Opera 10.10, released at about the same time as Microsoft held its PDC event, fared pretty badly. Faster than IE8, but slower than everything else, including the (private) PDC IE9 build. Opera 10.50, released a few weeks ago? It's the fastest browser on the chart. It's faster even than prerelease versions of Firefox and Chrome, not to mention faster than the public IE9 Platform Preview build. SunSpider isn't the be-all/end-all of JavaScript performance, and it fails to represent real-world scenarios in a number of ways. However, it's clear that Opera's JavaScript performance has improved substantially over the period of about six months.

And most significantly, these improvements are now in people's hands. 10.50 isn't some preview release. It's a released, stable version of the browser.

This isn't the first time this has happened, either. Redmond promoted the JavaScript performance of IE8 in the run-up to its release, too. The result? By the time IE8 was released, or shortly after, competing browsers had once again overtaken it, with stable, shipping versions outpacing Microsoft's efforts.

By taking the approach of infrequent, but substantial releases, Internet Explorer users are being denied timely access to much of the progress that Microsoft is making, and hence denied the ability to take advantage of IE9's greater standards compliance.

We see similar situations, albeit with fewer easy-to-use graphs, when we look at how well other browsers implement SVG, or CSS, or HTML5. The current stable releases of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera are all streets ahead of the current stable version of IE. Make no mistake: these other browsers do not provide complete, systematic, exhaustive implementations of these specifications (though Opera's SVG support is not far off). But they are already providing extensive capabilities, not to mention impressive performance, to Web developers. And they're doing so today.

But Microsoft? IE9 is going to provide thorough, complete implementations of many of these specifications. This is certainly a good thing. It's what all browsers should strive to be doing. But Microsoft isn't going to release these features piecemeal. The current IE9 engine is already a huge improvement over IE8, but its preview status makes it irrelevant. We don't know when IE9 will be finished—2011 seems the earliest possibility, and there's an outside chance that it won't be until 2012 that IE9 ships.

In the meantime, we get nothing from Redmond.

This approach sets Microsoft apart from the other browser vendors. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all get regular updates. I don't just mean security fixes, though they get those too—they get regular feature updates that improve their performance, improve their standards compliance, and improve their user interfaces. Firefox, for example, had release 3.0 in July 2008, 3.5 in June 2009, and 3.6 in January 2010. Opera 9.5 was released in September 2007, with 10.0 in September 2009, 10.10 in November 2009, and 10.50 in March 2010.

Over a similar time frame, Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006, IE8 in March 2009. And now nothing further is likely until 2011.

There's a similar discrepancy when it comes to support. Firefox 3.0 is going to receive its last-ever patch at the end of the month—a total supported lifetime of a little under two years. Internet Explorer 6, released in 2001, is still supported by Microsoft. It's old, its use is thoroughly discouraged, but it's also a part of Windows XP, and since Windows XP is supported, so is IE6.

Avoiding moving targets

Microsoft's approach is that it wants to build stable, consistent platforms. It is important to Microsoft that IE8 is, for example, a known target that developers can aim for, without there being a series of 8.1, 8.2, 8.3... point releases that might improve features, but also create more targets for developers, and not the stable, consistent platform that Microsoft wants to provide. It would also incur substantial support overheads.

The attitude is one that makes sense for Windows or Office. There are platforms that push out updates more regularly (Ubuntu, for example, has a regular six-month release cycle), but both of the two major desktop operating systems (Windows and Mac OS X) have lengthier release cycles. But the difference with these platforms is that in a sense they're more arbitrary. Microsoft and Apple get to pick the direction of their future OSes, and each new release introduces a raft of new—proprietary—features. There's no real benefit to releasing piecemeal updates in the same way.

But that's not the case for Web browsers. We have a fairly good idea what the target is, because the target isn't defined by the vendor. It's defined by W3C. Regular updates, making progress towards the various Web standards, are, in my view, a lot more useful. Microsoft's desire to have exhaustively tested, complete implementations of each part of each spec is laudable, and that should certainly be the ultimate goal, but fundamentally, partial implementations are still useful. By taking the approach of infrequent but substantial releases, Internet Explorer users are being denied timely access to much of the progress that Microsoft is making, and hence denied the ability to take advantage of IE9's greater standards compliance.

We've written before that Microsoft's approach to browser development does not engage Web developers as thoroughly as it could. To an extent, the decision with IE9 to produce this platform preview, and to update it every eight weeks, goes some way towards addressing this. Microsoft says that the eight-week cycle is the one that will make feedback manageable and allow the most effective involvement with the process. Sure, it'd be nice if we could see the progress more regularly (something like Chrome's dev channel would seem an ideal compromise), but the platform preview nonetheless represents progress on Microsoft's part.

Getting developers involved is only part of the story, though. Getting features into end users' hands is valuable, and perhaps the most important thing that a browser vendor can do. Having a fast, standards compliant browser engine is only useful if it's shipping and available, and making Web users wait two or three years between releases just isn't good enough. To get people energised and actually in favor of IE, Microsoft needs to retake the position it once had: the best, most compliant, most stable, fastest browser around. During the browser war era it held this position. But those days are long gone.

112 Reader Comments

There are two sides of this, end users want features right away, but if those features and bug fixes are compelled on people and they break corporate intranet sites, then corporations will grind to a halt, perhaps losing millions of dollars a day for many days until their intranet site/app gets fixed. This is utterly unacceptable. I think people are going to have to live with the fact that at least one major browser needs to have slow update periods for this reason. So I see IE always having a slow update period because MS looks out for corporations, I guess things in the future will become "IE for corporations and people too lazy/apahetic to change default browser in windows" and "chrome/firefox/opera/safari divided amongst everyone else" and that's just the way it is/will be.

Where is the mention of the corporate/enterprise consumer who wants to write apps targeting a browser platform and not be worried about perpetual upgrade cycles breaking their apps on a semi-annual basis? How about consumers, many of whom seem content to run older software for long periods of time.

Pushing upgrades at a rapid pace may be fantastic for some, but to assert that everyone should be getting browser upgrades all the time because it's what everyone wants (web developers and tech enthusiasts != everyone) seems a bit myopic. In its turn I am sure Microsoft would love if everyone would just get off its legacy APIs and upgrade to "the new shiz" with every Windows release, but if it expected that of people or tried to enforce it, customer loss would be imminent. That's actually part of the appeal, even if it means you'll have to wait a while to rock out with HTML5 (a draft spec which won't be finalized for several more years, remember?)

I find this attitude from technologists that average people *need* to catch up with what technologists want rather offensive. You may want to use the latest tech everywhere, but it is not your god-given right to do so when it is costing somebody else time and money to support your whims. Similarly, it is not reasonable for end-users to expect support for infinite time intervals. The point though is that there must be a balance. The market is good at finding one, and it is ultimately what will decide. If IE continues to bleed market share due to its glacial release pace then something will certainly be done to improve it, however nowhere in this article is that proven. It is more likely that IE is still making up for the substantial engineering deficit incurred in the long period where there was simply no IE development occuring.

At the end of the day IE is meant to roll with Windows, it is meant to have long periods of gauranteed support. It receives extensive testing with a large suite of software that many other competing browsers receive virtually no exposure to. It is simply not the same as any other browser on the market. That doesn't necessarily make it bad or wrong, though -- just not focused on web junkies or web devs.

If Microsoft truly wants to promote "the same markup everywhere"…, it needs to downplay the significance of "IE, the versioned platform." Developers should be discouraged from assuming some particular version of the browser.

This is spot on and how I've always felt. People shouldn't create a site for browsers X, Y, and Z; they shold create a site according to standards and then (unfortunately but inevitably) tweak as necessary for browsers X, Y, and Z. Then if browsers A, B, and C are any good, the site should work in them too (if they're minority browsers, they should have no choice but to support standards because for the most part, web devs won't go out of their way to support them). Unfortunately, MS is encouraging the wrong behavior.

You keep putting out great content Peter, so thanks for that. In the short time you've been writing for Ars you've quickly become the finest writer for the site, in my opinion. (You also produce quality content at a higher rate than anyone else I am aware of, so).

I have two points about this one: First, I think your general point is correct but I think you are incorrect to say MS shouldn't treat IE like they do Office and Windows - I think they should do *exactly* that. When MS found they had big security shortcomings, they radically redesigned and systemized the way they handled updates to the Windows platform to the point where now even the most platform-update-phobic (large institutional IT departments) can easily embrace changes through the infrastructure MS provides. The same is true (an agressive development process) for Office. IE development seems to languish on a 'when we need it' basis (Which is where we get back to your point). I think MS should (and probably will) apply the same approach to IE as they have to Windows and the other platforms (development a consistent expectation with their customerbase and build communication tools to share the developments and 'sell' IE as a platform). That's really always been MS's great strength - their ability to communicate with customers and developers.

The second point is, I think this article (and your earlier one on the lack of nightly builds or regular builds from the IE team) points to a kind of focus on the content-centered web. I don't know any statistics (so I can't say one way or the other predominantly) but I'd imagine that the internet is just as much a business tool as an enternatinment one. The developers that are 'pushing the envelope' on the internet are entertainment-focused - but these are usually pretty fringe cases (Google, ...?) relative to the scope of the whole web. I think you do a disservice when you describe the web as 'thirsty for the advancement of technologies' that allow the integration of the <video> tag. There are a vast number of tools out there that work just as well under GDI as they do under DirectWrite; and there is no compelling reason to spend money transitioning them from one codebase to the next. I would wager that this base of applications is a lot larger than the base which is focused on embracing new features. In short, I think you're probably exagerrating the net effect of MS's 'laggardness.' The primary reasons for share loss are 1) bad security PR (completely undeserved for IE8) and 2) bad performance experience. The things that are traded away (moving target development) in exchange for what you gain (fringe new coding benefits for standards that are 5+ years out perpetually) is at least an arguable case.

Are there numbers published someplace that break out IE6 from enterprise vs home users? I'd wager the vast majority of those using IE6 don't have any control over the situation and furthermore Microsoft in a way created a situation where IE6 will live until April 2014 by not allowing for parallel installs. XP Mode in Windows 7 seems like the only way companies that for whatever reason can't migrate off IE6 entirely can run parallel versions of IE, and that requires rolling out an entirely new desktop OS.

When will the world chose to use IPV6? Surely much sooner then anyone will choose to use IDRP or CLNP just to mention a couple of ISO standards that once were mandated by the US government and most of the rest of the world as the future of the Internet. During his talk at Mix, Miguel de Icaza stated that his choice of .Net was motivated by his observation that Microsoft was the only company making a large investment in technology for software development. That is a pretty accurate description of reality. Of course, we don't have to worry much about Peter Bright ever understanding enough about software developement to recognize it.

I think that of necessity Microsoft is a bit timid if not shy about what it does with IE, because if Microsoft was to suddenly get extremely competitive again it would inevitably lead to charges of "Microsoft is a monopoly! No fair it can ship Windows and a browser, too!" I think that to avoid such charges in the future Microsoft will be more than happy to be perceived as perpetually behind by a step or two in the scheme of all things browser. Of course, consumers will lose out ultimately, but Microsoft's competitors don't care anything about that.... Microsoft giving them a handicap is all they seem to care about.

Microsoft has been behind the 8 ball on the internet ever since it's inception. They've failed with Search, they've failed with SOS, and they've failed with browsers. They're even gonna fail with Windows Phone 7, since Mozilla has dropped out. Mobile Browsers are a huge part of the success/failure of a mobile device. Microsoft really needs to get their act together....yes, the internet is here to stay.

More precisely, they could if they wanted to, but they really-really don't want to make transitioning from the fat client model (which they own) to the web based one, easy at all. So they'll do their utmost to sabotage that move.

In other words, with IE10, Microsoft wont have a HTML x.0 version to target, rather just an revision number in the WHAT-WG CVS to target.

Microsoft is still going to release big 24-36 month releases because corporations (and their software vendors) aren't that dynamic and flexible to handle major updates quicker. I would like it if they just shipped JS updates (.1, .2) every 6 months as their JS engine improves. Leave the layout engine alone and just make JS faster. Its better than nothing.

I'm confused. Why can't MS offer an IE9 public beta and encourage broad use of it? That would leave IE8 for the corporate developers and IT staff that need a stable target to meet their obligations, while giving MS positive feedback from the public at large. Once IE9 is released, within six months get the IE10 beta out. Rinse and repeat.

The long beta period for FF did wonders for building positive press when the 1.0 was released, and I don't see how this couldn't do some repair work on IE's reputation.

I'm sure that there is something that I'm not getting, I just wish I knew what it was.

This is a red herring. These applications can also be developed to web standards quite easily, and new ones are targeted at standards rather than IE8. The only problem are legacy ones based on IE6, which may or may not work in IE8 (soon to be 9) anyways.

The only solution for companies with these legacy apps is to either continue mandating IE6, or run the latest IE's in the IE6 render mode (which can still be provided aside a constantly improving, non-versioned IE).

MS is very far behind the pack. Even if they were level, and we assumed they would continue staying close to the front, their problem is that when they release a version, they are slightly ahead of their competitors. However, in the years leading to the next release, they fall drastically behind, until they catch up with another major release. More frequent updates would help solve this.

So I see IE always having a slow update period because MS looks out for corporations, I guess things in the future will become "IE for corporations and people too lazy/apahetic to change default browser in windows" and "chrome/firefox/opera/safari divided amongst everyone else" and that's just the way it is/will be.

I think Peter completely misses the fact that Microsoft's biggest customers for IE are corporate IT departments, which require Internet Explorer to be their "platform" for intranet-based web applications, and their needs are non-trivial. It's one thing to rapidly roll-out patches for bug fixes and security issues - it's another to do so for new functionality, especially with backward compatibility considerations. More than a few intranet applications treat IE4 (!) as their minimum web browser - these applications need to work on both IE4 and IE9 for IE9 to be viable.

Are there numbers published someplace that break out IE6 from enterprise vs home users?

The closest proxy I can think of is to look at your website stats and compare IE6 visits on weekdays vs weekends. For my company IE6 visits drop off significantly on the weekend, unsurprisingly. Unfortunately we can't ignore IE6 yet, the overall number of users is still significant.

I'm glad Microsoft is doing the right thing with IE9 (ignoring ACID3 and creating comprehensive tests) but I reserve the right to rail at them for the amount of time it's taken for them to get to this point. The cost to the web has been huge.

I work for a major US bank. The company is switching over to Windows 7, skipping Vista. But, unfortunatly almost all the teller machines are XP using IE6. Even though internet on those machines is prohibited, they can be used to access the company's intranet.

I'm unfortunatly stuck in an old wave still using XP on brand new machines, when I first installed Firefox I got yelled by the IT department manager, even though I work in IT, lol...

So I've been using IE6, I'm not supposed to use the internet for personal use but its been 3 months since I heard anyone complain, so today I installed Chrome. I'll see if anyone notices.

Stubourn company's using IE6 is the problem, I have no trouble accesing the intranet here using Chrome, Firefox or IE8, I dont know why IE6 is the only "approved" broweser there is.

There are two sides of this, end users want features right away, but if those features and bug fixes are compelled on people and they break corporate intranet sites, then corporations will grind to a halt, perhaps losing millions of dollars a day for many days until their intranet site/app gets fixed. This is utterly unacceptable. I think people are going to have to live with the fact that at least one major browser needs to have slow update periods for this reason. So I see IE always having a slow update period because MS looks out for corporations, I guess things in the future will become "IE for corporations and people too lazy/apahetic to change default browser in windows" and "chrome/firefox/opera/safari divided amongst everyone else" and that's just the way it is/will be.

The problem for Microsoft is that this doesn't matter anymore. Sure, when IE6 came out you had the options of IE6, Opera, the dying Netscape and a few other minor players. Compatibility didn't exist, standards weren't upheld and you basically picked a browser and built for it. Since IE came with every PC and was the market juggernaut, you built for it.

Now, however, you can build at the standards. The more websites that do it (along with companies and webapp makers and whatever), the more lock-in there is for browser makers. It doesn't matter how many updates are pumped out for firefox or chrome in the next few years, I know that a website I build today will still work (or at least only involve minor tweaking).

Can you actually show me something where it works perfectly fine on Chrome 1.x or Firefox 2.x and it doesn't run on Firefox 3.6 or Chrome 4.x? If not, I can't see a need for a "stable" browser environment.

IE6, IE7 and now IE8 can not be left behind. MS came out with a support timeline at launch, and they need to stand behind it, for better or worse. Corporations expect it, and they lose trust (and in turn $$) if they break it.

That said, the author is on point when it comes to the issues and problems surrounding Internet Explorer. As a previous commenter said, the web is a vastly different place NOW than it was 10 years ago. 10 years ago web standards weren't in the same ballpark they are today. Corporations need to be able to develop for stability, so they feel comfortable developing for IE6 or IE7 and knowing that for the next decade, it will work, it's supported and secure. What needs to happen is that MS needs to get corporations away from the idea of developing for IE6, and into the arms of developing for HTML 4.01, XHTML, etc. As browsers unify around rendering standards for doctypes and specifications, that stability, trust and support remains, and standards compliance can move forward. Develop to your DOCTYPE, not to your BROWSER.

IE6, 7 and 8 need to maintain their path, but IE9 should embrace a new kind of stability in the form of DOCTYPEs, rather than a static rendering engine in defiance of change. If stability is required, then develop for a stable doctype, not a stable browser.

Stubourn company's using IE6 is the problem, I have no trouble accesing the intranet here using Chrome, Firefox or IE8, I dont know why IE6 is the only "approved" broweser there is.

Having come from a company with that mentality, I'd wager it's mainly inertia and laziness. Big rollouts take a lot of time & effort, rewriting policies & documentation is a pain, and testing everything is a ton of work. It's a lot easier to just declare "This setup works... nobody is allowed to change it!". It's a BS excuse, usually from a combo of the PHBs who are afraid of change, and lazy admins who don't want to put in the work.

(And before the IT support folk jump on me - I *am* one of those lazy admins... Just saying there's few excuses for not getting it done.)

Fundamentally, I think MS recognizes it doesn't have to be "the bestest and the firstest", it simply has to be good enough. It's unlikely it will ever be the leader in all categories, not when there's so many competitors with no huge corporate compatibility and stability commitments gunning for it, and considering that the competition leads it in many areas that are simply not standardized or widely used at the moment (HTML5, for example), there simply isn't much penalty for their customers in IE not leading the way. It's probably even advantageous for IE to trail the bleeding edge by 12 to 24 months, in order for standards to sort themselves out. Let Gecko and WebKit do the hard work of breaking the trail, while IE focuses on compatibility and stability.

There are two sides of this, end users want features right away, but if those features and bug fixes are compelled on people and they break corporate intranet sites, then corporations will grind to a halt, perhaps losing millions of dollars a day for many days until their intranet site/app gets fixed. This is utterly unacceptable. I think people are going to have to live with the fact that at least one major browser needs to have slow update periods for this reason. So I see IE always having a slow update period because MS looks out for corporations, I guess things in the future will become "IE for corporations and people too lazy/apahetic to change default browser in windows" and "chrome/firefox/opera/safari divided amongst everyone else" and that's just the way it is/will be.

The problem for Microsoft is that this doesn't matter anymore. Sure, when IE6 came out you had the options of IE6, Opera, the dying Netscape and a few other minor players. Compatibility didn't exist, standards weren't upheld and you basically picked a browser and built for it. Since IE came with every PC and was the market juggernaut, you built for it. Now, however, you can build at the standards. The more websites that do it (along with companies and webapp makers and whatever), the more lock-in there is for browser makers. It doesn't matter how many updates are pumped out for firefox or chrome in the next few years, I know that a website I build today will still work (or at least only involve minor tweaking). Can you actually show me something where it works perfectly fine on Chrome 1.x or Firefox 2.x and it doesn't run on Firefox 3.6 or Chrome 4.x? If not, I can't see a need for a "stable" browser environment.

Chicken and egg problem. People who design with chrome/firefox in mind tend to update their stuff for the latest versions, people who can't design for those browsers because of said problem do not. But really that's just my guess, I'm not a web developer so I'll defer to someone with authority in the field.

I would go even a bit further and say Mozilla and Chrome benefit from having Microsoft in the room. Microsoft's goal is developing something once, the standards the author mentions are currently (still) moving targets. HTML5 is a draft. CSS3 is a draft. Pushing Microsoft to target drafts (which by definition may change), invites the madness that you have now: web developers would have to target different versions of their site to different browsers. The author's suggestions here enhance the problems.

Microsoft is the big elephant here (65% of the market still counts for a lot), so they can:

... act as they used to (do whatever they want) and screw everything up for everybody.... be cutting edge which makes you prone including stuff that's going to changeor... be last to every party but make sure that everything they release is authoritative and right.

I think the latter is the best solution.

As for the Chrome-like version-less stuff: Call me paranoid, but I don't like programs updating themselves without my permission. What if a new version breaks my machine? Breaks my favorite site? Can I revert?

You may want to use the latest tech everywhere, but it is not your god-given right to do so when it is costing somebody else time and money to support your whims.

You are missing the giant part where web devs lose massive amounts of time and money supporting your crappy old browser. My current process for getting a website up to speed involves two major steps. 1) Create the site to standards. 2) Pop some pain-killers and make it work in IE.

And what exactly is it that corporations can't do in newer browsers that they can in IE6? ActiveX should have died years ago. Anything else I can think of is purely IE 6 not supporting standards. It is not MS's job to continue to allow these idiot corporations to require ancient technology purely because they are too lazy to fix their own software.

aggressiva wrote:

People who design with chrome/firefox in mind tend to update their stuff for the latest versions, people who can't design for those browsers because of said problem do not. But really that's just my guess, I'm not a web developer so I'll defer to someone with authority in the field.

People who build to Firefox/WebKit/Opera generally build once and find that it is still working a year later and doesn't need updating.

However, I would point to IE's broader decline as evidence that the company is still doing plenty wrong. As improved as IE8 is—and it is a huge improvement—it's still lacking relative to the competition. Its scripting engine is slow, its support for things like SVG, Canvas, and HTML5 video is nonexistent, and it's inexplicably slow at basic operations like starting up and creating new tabs.

I think the point made in the first sentence is persuasive. I'm not sure how much of a connection there is between that and what follows. I can see factors such as "its scripting engine is slow" and "it's inexplicably slow at basic operations like starting up and creating new tabs" would matter to end-users, and, if they tried something else they might stick with it on that account. But I wonder how many users are concerned by IE's lack of support for "things like SVG, Canvas, and HTML5 video". These things matter to web-developers, who are an important constituency, of course. (If they weren't Bill Gate's wouldn't have been making personal promises to WaSP and Molly Holzschlag.) These technologies are important for the future of the web, but I doubt they're driving shifts in browser choice. There's probably an effect whereby IE's lack of support for such standards (and errant CSS support) gives it a bad name among people who must write for it and hack around it and that bad reputation so to speak "leaks down" to non-technical users. But as for how important that effect is ...

I wouldn't like to suggest what's of most importance in driving the move to alternative browsers, and I wonder how we could be sure what is.

Besides what's been mentioned, it could be that people believe that IE is less secure. Certainly some commentators tell them that:

Quote:

Let me back off a little bit and just remind our listeners that the idea was that Internet Explorer, which as we're pretty much constantly saying is substantially, unfortunately, less secure than alternative browsers like Firefox - which I'm now using and you're using and we recommend ...

It could be that some users simply want to try something different -- almost that they wish to personalize their machine by installing alternative software. They might well like to feel that what they've got is better (as in fact it would be) but they might not really have any specific dissatisfaction with IE.

I don't think we can be sure exactly why end-users are making their choices.

Not to nitpick, but complete does not mean what the linked article says. MS said they're not going to worry if they fail Acid3 and focus on the stuff that most websites actually use. Which in practice may be a good idea, but it means that they are not aiming for complete support of web standards in IE9. Passing Acid3 does not prove you have complete support, but failing does prove your support is incomplete.

IE6, IE7 and now IE8 can not be left behind. MS came out with a support timeline at launch, and they need to stand behind it, for better or worse. Corporations expect it, and they lose trust (and in turn $$) if they break it.

Well is this true?

Who exactly are corporations going to switch to, if not MS?

Even if MS halves its supported lifetimes it's still going to be substantially ahead of Firefox or Ubuntu, or any of Apple's offerings.

As for the Chrome-like version-less stuff: Call me paranoid, but I don't like programs updating themselves without my permission. What if a new version breaks my machine? Breaks my favorite site? Can I revert?

Google's DNA tells them to ship apps where version doesn't matter. Search, Gmail, GTalk, GDocs ... version doesn't matter for any of them. (Gmail's concession to the "old version" mentality is that they let you use the 'v1' interface, mainly because that's faster on sub-1Mbps broadband lines). Chrome gives users the same experience -- version doesn't matter, and the UX slowly evolves over time.

Still, if you use Chromium, you get every point release and you can pick the version you want. There are even automatic updaters that pull updates from chromium.org.

Microsoft doesn't want to follow standards and the only reason they adhered to a few now is because they have fallen behind, their browsers were made to access websites build upon their proprietary technology, Microsoft's shitty browsers are a form of DRM.

Where is the mention of the corporate/enterprise consumer who wants to write apps targeting a browser platform and not be worried about perpetual upgrade cycles breaking their apps on a semi-annual basis?

And these companies have no one to blame but themselves. Write to standards not a specific browser = Problem solved forever. Yes, this will take some time to get past, but this really needs to be driven home now so that we don't have this excuse 10 years in the future.

I work for a major US bank. The company is switching over to Windows 7, skipping Vista. But, unfortunatly almost all the teller machines are XP using IE6. Even though internet on those machines is prohibited, they can be used to access the company's intranet.

I'm unfortunatly stuck in an old wave still using XP on brand new machines, when I first installed Firefox I got yelled by the IT department manager, even though I work in IT, lol...

So I've been using IE6, I'm not supposed to use the internet for personal use but its been 3 months since I heard anyone complain, so today I installed Chrome. I'll see if anyone notices.

Stubourn company's using IE6 is the problem, I have no trouble accesing the intranet here using Chrome, Firefox or IE8, I dont know why IE6 is the only "approved" broweser there is.

Get ChromeFrame? Thats what IT departments are doing to keep their jalopy browsers and satisfy dysfunctional IT management.

The majors complaints from the webdev community over past IE versions boiled down to Microsoft doing things their own way, and thus forcing everybody else to workaround their quirks cause you couldn't just ignore IE.

Now that they're doing what appears to be an honest effort, implementing well-defined, stable specs (which takes time), we argue they should just release whatever their working on more often, regardless of whether it contains partial, or quirky, implementations of those specs?

Seriously guys, do we really want Microsoft implementing loosely defined specs (such as rounded corners) as IE only extensions to the spec, as other browsers do (-moz-border-* and -webkit-border-*)?

yyyyeah, I'm long in the tooth, been in and out of IT since green screen, IE has never been "stable" or "secure" ... ever. IE4 was the last decent browser they made (1998 I think).. Corporate IT is the embodiment of the mob mentality. A group of otherwise smart people acting only out of fear of loosing their jobs, making weak decisions until they can no longer keep market forces at bay, then they reluctantly change.

yyyyeah, I'm long in the tooth, been in and out of IT since green screen, IE has never been "stable" or "secure" ... ever. IE4 was the last decent browser they made (1998 I think).. Corporate IT is the embodiment of the mob mentality. A group of otherwise smart people acting only out of fear of loosing their jobs, making weak decisions until they can no longer keep market forces at bay, then they reluctantly change.

Says someone who's not in charge of the budget. Would you be willing to take a pay cut so that the intranet apps can be updated to latest and greatest when it works perfectly fine?